


Not of Blood

by littlecloud



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Angst, F/M, Gen, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-18
Updated: 2013-10-18
Packaged: 2017-12-29 18:46:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 301
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1008782
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/littlecloud/pseuds/littlecloud
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The disease makes him feel less than a ghost, a negative of a person.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Not of Blood

The shadows cast a green glow from his skin onto hers. Peering into the mirror, she sees she wears it like a brand of the last six months of insomnia. He is heavier than he looks, arms draped over her and scaled limbs chaffing her inner thighs. His short, panicky breaths are what keep her awake – the final stages of Kepral’s Syndrome. It cracks even in _her_ chest, an aching congestion soon to be the vast openness of losing a loved one.

So, she lets him collapse onto her at night, chasing the heat that may stall his grave.

-

Sometimes he has nightmares unique to his species, waking up in the morning reciting their sting. He believes they are real memories, and apologizes for drowning butterflies in an Earth lake. He says he does not know what came over him, but his body just wants to kill any way it can. She knows.

-

The disease makes him feel less than a ghost, a negative of a person. So many lives were ended at his hand; he could fill a morgue with them all, encumber a stadium with their mourning family members. Thirty-something years he has had to live bare nothing in comparison to those he’s taken.  He did not realize at the time that he was annulling his existence, but as his physical form wastes away, he wonders if all he has ever been is an instrument.  That maybe he never had a soul that made him Whole. That he was just born to be the reversal of life.

-

He worships Kalahira, goddess of the sea, and lusts after her differently than any other woman – inorganically, not of blood.

But moisture is what killed him in the first place.

She says, “On Earth, they teach us how to swim.”  He knows.


End file.
